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Should the New York Times Hire a Radical?

If you find yourself in a room full of politically minded people and want to get everyone shouting quickly, start talking about the state of prestige-media opinion writing. Progressives and conservatives are both sure that their team is being systematically excluded from the op-ed pages of gatekeeper institutions like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic. Each side thinks the other is grossly over-represented. They can’t both be right—so who is?

Lately, a new argument has emerged from the progressive side of this debate: if these publications want political diversity, they should get it by hiring opinion writers from the far-Left, not the Right.

The far-Left’s story goes like this: after the Trump election, men like New York Times opinion editor James Bennet and Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg concluded that coastal media elites lived in an echo-chamber that blinded them to the views of many Americans. Seeking to correct this, they hired conservative opinion writers like Bret Stephens and Kevin Williamson—despite the fact that these Never Trumpers don’t actually represent the views of most conservatives. Meanwhile, the increasing influence of radical voices on the Left, buoyed by the Bernie Sanders candidacy, has been ignored. The New York Times employs multiple Never Trump conservatives, but not a single socialist.

Bennet and Goldberg are trying to avoid political homogeneity—but perhaps they should get it by turning their publications into a debate between the center-Left and the far-Left, instead of elevating idiosyncratic conservatives with no real constituency. That’s what Ta-Nehisi Coates argued in a remarkable closed-door exchange with Goldberg that was later leaked to the press:

Goldberg: Do you think The Atlantic would be diminished if we narrowed the bounds of acceptability in ideological discourse, even as we grow in diversity?Coates: Again, I don’t think it’s a question of narrowing. I think it’s where the lines are drawn.Goldberg: Well, it is if you bring the lines in.Coates: Well, no, you open it up. You understand what I’m saying? Like, as I said before, I don’t think 15 years ago or 20 years ago we would have ran “The Case For Reparations.” So that means it’s opened up in a different direction.

Eric Levitz ran with this argument in a recent column in New York magazine called “The Media Can Be Ideologically Diverse Without Conservatives.” He writes:

The far-Left has ideas that can be argued civilly, in good faith, without violating core liberal values. And those ideas are more responsive to the problems of our era than those of the NeverTrumpers. What’s more, by at least by one criterion, they’re actually more “mainstream”: While only 5 percent of American voters are anti-Trump Republicans, 6 percent are self-identified socialists.

How would giving a more prominent platform to the far-Left change the terms of civic debate? According to Levitz, it would allow us to debate questions like: should the Constitution be burned? Is it immoral to be rich? Should prisons be abolished? Is the Supreme Court a legitimate institution? Should we nationalize banking? Should we replace global free trade with (horseshoe theory alert!) “nationalist protectionism”? Should we abolish intellectual property? Should the means of production be socialized?

These are better questions, according to Levitz, because liberals are currently being forced to debate conservatives whose ideas have been “empirically disproven”:

The scarcity of worthwhile conservative writers reflects the movement’s intellectual paralysis. Conservatives who were willing to abandon their movement’s dogmas once the Reagan-era verities turned stale have ceased to be recognizable as conservatives. The others have clung to ideas too discredited to “challenge” liberal readers: The notions that tax cuts spur growth; high deficits produce runaway inflation; inequality is the necessary and worthwhile price of economic dynamism; and social-welfare programs inevitably breed dependence (and thus, hurt the poor more than they help them) are all empirical claims that have proven demonstrably false.

Putting these threads together, we have the two pillars that undergird the far-Left argument: far-Left ideas have more purchase among the American people than the ideas of the Never Trump conservatives that populate the opinion page, and they are empirically sounder.

Being able to entertain these two claims depends on doing some sleight-of-hand with our political categories. If we class the conservatives who write for prestige publications as “Never Trump conservatives,” their views look wildly overrepresented relative to the general population—only 5 percent of the American electorate would describe themselves that way. Of course, if we described these columnists simply as “conservatives,” we reach the opposite conclusion. 36 percent of American voters describe themselves as conservatives, but only 18 percent of the opinion writers at the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Atlantic are non-progressives.

If I were on a mission to make Bret Stephens’s views look maximally overrepresented, instead of classing him as a “conservative,” I’d class him as a foreign policy hawk who is mildly skeptical of climate science and believes the 2nd Amendment should be repealed. I could create a category for Bret Stephens so narrow that Bret Stephens is the category’s only member. Such a category would make up a mere three hundred millionth of the American electorate, but a full 8 percent of New York Times opinion columnists. Surprise—I’ve found that ‘Bret Stephens conservatives’ are extremely overrepresented among prestige media opinion columnists.

This trick winds up being crucial to Levitz’s argument, because it’s the only way you can swallow what comes next: radical Left ideas are more popular than moderate conservative ones. If 6 percent of American voters identify as socialists, but only 5 percent as Never Trump conservatives, you might very well conclude that there’s more demand for columns about burning the Constitution than reigning in fiscal deficits.

It’s undeniable that in the wake of the Sanders candidacy, socialism is having a moment. Someone who self-identified as a democratic socialist almost captured the nomination of the Democratic Party—until recently, an unthinkable development. But ‘socialism’ is a funny term—it gets deployed in public life to mean anything from Scandinavian welfare capitalism to the dictatorship of the proletariat. And Sanders stood for something closer to the former than the latter—which means that we can make very few conclusions about how many American voters are interested in the debate about destroying the foundations of American society that Levitz wants to have.

Indeed, my guess is that burning the Constitution, abolishing prisons, and converting the means of production to communal ownership would poll poorly with the American public. We can’t say for sure, because these ideas are too radical for anyone to have bothered asking the public what they think about them. But there is exactly one constituency in America for whom these ideas are mainstream: highly educated far-Left activists. In the grad school dorms, book launch parties, and sustainable coffee shops of America’s most prosperous cities, scrapping the Constitution may be a perfectly ordinary thing to debate. But nowhere else.

This is Levtiz’s central flaw. He wants to purge the op-ed page of views held by a politically marginalized minority and replace them with the views of an even more politically marginalized minority. He justifies this preference by casting the center-Right platform as unpopular and empirically shaky, even though the very same is true for the radical Left. So why would we necessarily prefer one over the other?

Levitz tries to answer that question by deploying the language of empirical objectivity and claiming that center-Right ideas are discredited in a way that far-Left ideas are not. But this is laughable on its face. Trade protectionism is one of the ideas that Levitz thinks is “more responsive to the problems of our era” than the “demonstrably false” center-Right approach. But in a survey of economists, a full 100 percent said that trade protectionism doesn’t work. Other ideas, like economic nationalization and abolishing intellectual property, do have support among a minority of academics—but so do conservative ideas. A full 40 percent of American economists are politically conservative. Levitz needs to pretend that the ideas of those economists are “disproven” because he otherwise has no warrant for why the ideas of one group should be systematically preferred over another.

What Levitz does have is something we all share: a desire to see our team win. When he declares that free trade and fiscal restraint are on the ash heap of history, so it’s time to have a debate about socializing the means of production, he’s doing something deeply human: interpreting the world in a way that casts my preferences as obviously good and your preferences as obviously wrong. This happens especially often because it’s lately become strategically important to cast yourself as the victim if you want people to listen to you. Levitz and others need to present themselves as unfairly marginalized, chalking up the radical Left’s lack of representation to structural discrimination instead of unsatisfactory performance in the marketplace of ideas.

But that marketplace always benefits from a diversity of smart arguments, and that’s why, despite all of the above, the New York Times should in fact hire a radical for its opinion page. It’s ultimately not so important if radical leftism isn’t popular outside of a sociologically distinct minority—because the benefits of viewpoint diversity come from checking our biases, not from making different constituencies feel included. The airing of radical ideas sharpens everyone, because a centrism forced to rebut them will become a better, smarter centrism. And if we want to find a way out of the tribal mess we’re trapped in, that’s exactly what we need to build.

Levitz and others think that moderate conservatives don’t deserve their op-ed platform in part because few voters today back those ideas—but that same argument would of course apply to radicalism. Instead, we should welcome smart, well-reasoned, good faith arguments regardless of their popularity. And that means that Bret Stephens will have a seat at the table alongside Eric Levitz.

Nicholas Phillips is a research associate at Heterodox Academy and a law student at the NYU School of Law. Follow him on Twitter at @czar_nicholas_

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I look forward to reading how its racist (and false) to notice that Socialist America has a toilet paper shortage and even if it did, it would be prove that Socialism was improving everyone’s lives as people moved to “green solutions”.

I always am amused when journos talk about something being “empirically false” considering the last time they stepped into a math class was probably in high school. What they do is find quantitative researchers whose findings support their agenda, or can be spun in a way that makes it appear as though they support their agenda, and write some snark-piece about how “science” has proven them correct.

If you think “notions that tax cuts spur growth; high deficits produce runaway inflation; inequality is the necessary and worthwhile price of economic dynamism; and social-welfare programs inevitably breed dependence (and thus, hurt the poor more than they help them)” have not been proven demonstrably false then you’ve not been paying much attention for the last 30 years or so.

#Skimuch,
Bear with me and explain your comment. Are you suggesting that the surging Trump economy is due to economic-left principles in some way? Are you suggesting that the current lessening of bloodshed (although not anti-American rhetoric) in the Middle East is due to some kind of non-conservative foreign policy that Trump is enacting?
My point is that while you’re welcome to dislike him for all kinds of reasons, the bald success of his policies on these two fronts would indicate that there’s some validity to them.

However, now that you mentioned him, you need to look at some 10-year charts of GDP growth rates, real wage growth, household wealth, etc., and then support a Trump “surging economy” that’s not just an extension of already existing trends. The stock market is not a good indicator of the nation’s overall economic health, and the most recent run up is a function Republican tax giveaways to corporations.

At least you could stick to one name its confusing and annoying that you would use two and it makes me question whether you are here in good faith or are a semi – sophisticated Troll. Trickle down economics is the biggest boogieman in leftist history. Almost no one believes in trickle down economics as leftists portray it. I don’t know what positive economics trends you could be possibly looking at that Trump has road the coat-tails of that existed during the Obama presidency. Trump has already had as many quarters of 3% GDP growth as Obama in 8 years. Small Business owners aren’t idiots they know when they have a friend versus an enemy in the White House and contrary to popular belief most Americans work for what are considered small businesses. As for household wealth and real wage growth those are important indicators but not the only ones. You leftists always attack the stock market but its made millions wealthy and secured millions of retirements. Everyone should be in it and its a unadulterated good when its going up.

in the UK where we had too much socialism in the 60s and 70s and still suffer from welfare dependancy whereby until recently your rent was open ended resulting in some immigrants exploiting it such that they received for one family £200,000 per year in rent (this equates to £500,000 gross of tax income) just to pay their rent!

accordingly it has never been empirically proven. in fact if you understand statistics and economics you will realise that it can never be.

the problem is reduced to what is the correct level morally and economically? this must change frequently.

I must have fat fingered my screen name, but in my defense the MacBook butterfly keyboard sucks and I touch-type very quickly. The link is to the St. Louis Fed Economic Data, where you won’t see any “Trump bump,” just a continuation of trends.

Yeah, that’s a favorite argument of the Left. “Since all views but our own are scientifically wrong, there is no point in arguing them. The only debate must be between the Left and the Far Left.” All the leftist sects agree they have found the revealed truth, and imposing it upon the benighted normals like us is so transcendently important that they are relieved of any moral limitations.

They *hate* us. Look at Twitter. Look at Facebook. Try and tell yourself that leftists are just nice people who disagree with us on a few policy details. Stop fooling yourself.

Understand that this must get much worse before it can get better. We may wish to stop the cultural/political struggle, but they can’t stop. Their religion tells them we are greedy, racist, sexist, homophobe morons who hate science and love Hitler. How could they tolerate us? How could they ever allow us power?

Conservatism is the psychological profile of the all-foundation moral matrix in combination with the cognitive style of holistic intuitionist Aristotelian empiricism. It is the predisposition (ala Hibbing*) toward the set of moral intuitions for which the object of care is the family unit – social capital – and which favor process-based negative conceptions of liberty, equality, justice, and fairness. Its goal is “to create a healthy, happy society” that does the most possible good for the most possible people. It accepts human nature as immutable, and sees the enemy of liberty as consolidated,

concentrated, political power. It therefore sees government as a necessary evil, the purpose of which is to protect rights, and for which power must be restricted lest tyranny and oppression rule.
Liberalism is the psychological profile of the three-foundation moral matrix, with extra emphasis on care, in combination with the cognitive style of WEIRD rationalist Platonic idealism. It is the predisposition (ala Hibbing) toward the set of moral intuitions for which the object of care is the individual and his/her feelings, and which favor outcome-based positive conceptions of liberty, equality, justice, and fairness. Its goal is “to create a healthy, happy society” that does the most possible good for the most possible people. It sees human nature as having unlimited potential, and sees political power as a source of good. It therefore sees government as the ultimate tool for achieving good, for which power must be consolidated and concentrated in order to prevent the rich and greedy from abusing and oppressing the less fortunate.

And the Laffer Curve is not about growth (or jobs) but about tax take, clearly undermining the case for a high tax regime in pure reason. It’s self-evident that is you take away 100% of a man’s earning that he will not work unless forced to (ie, pure socialism). And it requires a reasoned argument against it, which we have not seen. The same argument that is used against the Laffer Curve, which is that the real world is more complex than the Laffer Curve describes, can also be used to defend it since factors outside of the curve can defeat what it should produce, but that’s not a flaw int he Laffer Curve itself. The problem with the Laffer Curve isn’t that it’s not true but that it is too obviously true and undermines a high tax regime beloved of the Left and progressives. And so follow the unsubstantive arguments against it that amount to “we don’t like this equation”.

But for certain: it has not been disproven whatever it is that you read that has lead you to that falsehood.

It’s human nature. Human beings will do whatever they need to do to keep as much of there money/resources as possible. Thats what you see all these progressive big mouth rich people railing against wealth while at the same time taking advantage of every tax loop hole and shelter as everyone else and investing or saving based on the current tax climate. Increasing taxes to a punitive amount does in fact lessen the taxes taken. And it has been proven historically.

But in a survey of economists, a full 100 percent said that trade protectionism doesn’t work.

It certainly worked for Japan and South Korea, and today it’s going along quite well for China.

I suppose it’s how economists are defining trade protectionism and how the protectionist policies are implemented by the governments. For example, all three allow(ed) the import of most raw materials – some agricultural goods were troublesome to the farm lobby and banned. Machines used to manufacture intermediate and finished goods were acceptable too. What was (is) tightly controlled by tariff and non-tariff barriers were (are) value-added consumer goods from garments to automobiles, i.e. the items the industrialised West excelled in producing, and also cultural goods such as films, which the US dominates. All three governments pursue export-oriented growth and reward companies that achieve targets. The producers manufacture goods to meet advanced nations’ technical specifications and, whilst battling for market share overseas, learn to improve their goods in several aspects such as design, price, features, etc. The companies are able to rely on the protected home market for their profits to finance their overseas battles. Hyundai’s US customers get 10-year warranties but those in Korea never see such guarantees.

So, would the Atlantic or the NYT be justified in no platforming a writer who advocates the US or the developed West implement a S. Korean-esque trade policy because 100 per cent of economists say protectionism doesn’t work?

… liberals are currently being forced to debate conservatives whose ideas have been “empirically disproven”

“Being forced”? That’s quite a whopper; the lament really over-eggs it. No one is forcing anyone to do anything. The progressives are choosing to debate conservatives on a variety of topics. They could ignore conservatives, if they chose. If the ideas are as empty as they claim, why bother?

What we have here is cherished progressive shibboleths such as “the gender wage/earnings/wealth gap” and “the blank slate” being exposed for the nonsense they are by conservatives and even centrists. Other thans appeals to emotion and collective solidarity, progressives don’t have effective ways to rebut the multivariate analysis. They may either concede the point or take their ball and stomp off the field of play. Neither of these choices is appealing, so “let’s play ball with the socialists who already accept our principles” is the gambit, one that also has the added advantage of shifting the Overton Window further left by declaring ideas such as intersectionalism and diversity are the middle-of-the-road mainstream. Further, the re-emergence of the IQ debate scares the bejesus out of progressives – even Sam Harris is willing to talk about it. Read Coates’s thoughts on the subject in the linked article: “You can go into The Atlantic archives right now, and you can see me arguing with Andrew Sullivan about whether black people are genetically disposed to be dumber than white people. I actually had to take this seriously, you understand?” (Italics mine.)

Poor Ta-Nehisi. Didn’t have any facts to back him up, so probably had to resort to calling Sullivan a Nazi who’s raising the spectre of eugenics. I bet he mentioned ‘regatta’ too.

The HuffPost piece states: “Over and over, the humanity of certain people is allowed to be put up for debate in the name of ‘ideological diversity’.”(Italics mine.)

Really? The humanity? Isn’t this frequently the progressives’ exaggerated cry? Humanity being denied. Voices silenced. If lower IQ makes one less human, are high IQ Ahkenazi Jews more human then? I’m certain most people don’t see those with Down’s Syndrome as being less than human. They’re simply less intelligent. East Asians have higher IQs. Do Koreans and Japanese see whites being less human because they have lower IQs? Of course not. It’s their pointy bird noses and ape-like body hair that make them less human.

Understand this: it is a retreat by progressives being spun as an advance. As more DNA is unlocked and more mysteries of the mind revealed, progressives reckon their pseudo-scientific beliefs will be further pummeled. So goes the thinking: segregating to right-wing publications those who will likely reveal new findings minus the progressive spin reduces the risk of it hitting the public unfiltered. Yet, this ignores the dominance of the legacy media withers on. Not only does it no longer monopolise sense making, institutional mainstays such as Newsweek are on life support and even the Atlantic, one of America’s most historic publications, can’t sustain itself without the benevolence and chequebook of Steve Jobs’s widow. The Atlantic even ended readers’ comments because almost every article took a bollocking. The Guardian begs readers to forgo a cup of coffee per week to support its “courageous journalism”. Legacy media today competes not on the power of its ideas and its journalists’ word crafting, but on bullying Facebook, Youtube, and others to suppress opinions or be shamed and lose adverts.

Decades ago many progressives were courageous people who led the needed march to freedom. No longer. Today many are censorious control freaks demanding to ban this and punch that. This explains why even those who until recently called themselves progressive or liberal (in the US) now distance themselves from these authoritarian cowards.

About a century ago in the US, Progressives, Populists and Socialists were all hugger mugger and aligned against the predatory capitalism of the old money Robber Barons. Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” comes to mind as an example of the Progressive, Populist, Socialist fusion of 1903.

But beyond the scandal of the moment, the real Progressives were only a dissident faction of the governing elite as is demonstrated by Wilson Administration and the Progressive amendments to the Constitution of 1913.

That is what I assume the truly impressive “ga gamba” was driving at – but I could be wrong.

You did a well, EK. Certainly fighting against the trusts and monopolies that distorted the economy was needed, and I think addressing poor sanitation, improving food hygiene, and preventing medical quackery and snake oil remedies improved the lives of all. In the UK the suffragist movement (not merely suffragette because 40% of UK males were denied the vote until after WWI too) is a highlight, and so too was the suffragette campaign in States. In the US the free-speech and civil rights movements of the ’60s expanded liberty. I think lowering the voting age to 18 so those being conscripted by the military were given a say was important. I’m in favour of all citizens having the same rights and opportunities in the public domain, though I think pushing this into the private domain was an over reach. When it comes to the government stacking the deck to provide outcomes for certain groups that’s where I part company with the progressive agenda.

Don’t forget forced-technology transfer as the price of doing business in East Asia. Plus the “leaky” nature of intellectual property over there. Somehow the blueprints to smart phones and other devices miraculously end up in the hands of state-owned companies.

True that, which really screwed over displaced Western workers who would’ve moved up the valued-added manufacturing chain had Ricardian principles been applied. There are plenty of examples I could have mentioned, but that’s a whole other topic.

ga gamba, if you’ll please indulge a curiosity of mine that is irrelevant to the article: what do you do for a living? what is your educational background? I find your comments to be unusually thoughtful, well-informed, and skillfully written, as do many others on Quillette, and I wonder who the author is.

“Should we nationalize banking? Should we replace global free trade with (horseshoe theory alert!) “nationalist protectionism”? Should we abolish intellectual property? Should the means of production be socialized?

These are better questions, according to Levitz, because liberals are currently being forced to debate conservatives whose ideas have been “empirically disproven”:”

So, nationalizing the means of production has not been “empirically disproven”? These people never heard of the Soviet Union, the communist bloc, its collapse and so on?

“notions that tax cuts spur growth; high deficits produce runaway inflation; inequality is the necessary and worthwhile price of economic dynamism; and social-welfare programs inevitably breed dependence (and thus, hurt the poor more than they help them)” have not been proven demonstrably false then ”

Except this is a strawman expression of conservative views. You’re right, but only because of the way that you’ve expressed them.

It may not be ‘inevitable’ that social welfare causes dependence, but it is a frequent outcome. In addition, some people are parasitical and will work a social welfare system to avoid normal work.

Tax cuts don’t inevitably cause growth, but they may. The Laffer Curve, which is what this is really about, is not about growth but about tax-take and the oppression of economic activity. So cuts may release (rather than cause) greater economic activity.

High deficits may go with runaway inflation, but again it isn’t inevitable. And no thinking conservative would say that it’s directly causal. Rather, at some point there is a likelihood of a government wishing to soft-default by increasing inflation, or forced to do so to pay public wages.

It’s working fine if it protects food security. Indeed there are a number of security related issues that demand protectionism. And that’s before we examine the vulnerability of globalisation to mercantilism.

And what conservatives want all out protectionism of the sort that would effectively shut down trade? None.

There’s a balance to be had, and fully open-bordered globalisation is not it.

Note that there is nothing remotely conservative about any of these assertions. [Although inequality is the necessary if not worthwhile price of human existence.] They certainly wouldn’t characterize the programs of Bismark or Disraeli.

“we should welcome smart, well-reasoned, good faith arguments regardless of their popularity. ”

The media is out for the clicks. If people want facts and well-reasoned arguments, they are going to have to learn to search for obscure sites, preferably not in English.

It is obvious that the anti-imperialist left (the only left there is) is never going to be represented in the seat of the empire, no more than Louis XVI ever heard the arguments of the treasonous anti-monarchists from his inner circle of aristocrats. Levitz, when describing the agenda of the radical left, does not even mention that particular elephant in the room.

The empire is crumbling, whether the New York Times, Levitz, or Quillette mention it or not.

Can someone outline for me the center beliefs that authors like this guy espouse that are 100% that apparently mankind has agreed on. I might if the right of center is the fring and the far left is the fringe what are all the centrist “ideas” that are approved and that I agree with?

1) There is no alternative
2) There is no society
3) History has ended
4) The left leads to gulags and famine (see #1 and some comments here)
5) The US is a light that shines upon humanity
6) War, war, war and debt, debt, debt as the basis for
7) Growth, growth, growth

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